The parking lot behind Soho Thai Fusion Bar & Grill was packed early on a Saturday night — a good sign, for Soho Thai is large restaurant that needs a lot of diners to fill all the seats. But, as I said, it was early on a Saturday night so the parking lot wasn’t filled with folks hungry for chicken satay, mee krob and pad Thai noodles. Instead, it was the Lomita branch of Honeyboba that had brought in carloads of teens and 20-somethings. Boba may have come and gone at some places. But the Honeyboba chain seems to be giving gummy-balls-in-tea a whole new life.

Before we meander into Soho Thai, it’s worth making a stop at Honeyboba. There are four branches — along with Lomita, there’s Arcadia, Rosemead and Gardena. The Lomita outlet is a long, narrow space, with a line that snakes out the door from the counter and a patio in the parking lot that’s a popular spot for those who stop for one of the many boba tea options.

An advanced degree in boba-ology is needed to work your way through the menu. Aside from various sizes and six levels of sweetness (ranging from 125 percent Extra to 0 percent No Sweet), there are 21 flavors of Infused Ice Tea, 34 flavors of Royal Milk Tea, 20 flavors of Ice Crystals, 16 Creamy Smoothies, 13 Frosted Signature Milkies and 11 Yogurt Lushes. There are nine additional toppings.

How one chooses between Minty Minty Milk Tea, Lychee Lovers Ice Crystals and Blueberry Sky Iced Tea, I do not know. But the crowd of club kids, J-Poppers and K-Poppers seemed to know what they wanted.

By comparison, Soho Thai was downright sedate. It’s a sprawling room, surprisingly upscale for a Thai restaurant — not quite a special occasion destination, but definitely not a mini-mall storefront either. The “fusion” of the name comes not from dishes that are melded (or welded as the case may be) together, but from dishes scattered across the menu from various cuisines.

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Thai is the dominant motif, but there are also dishes from China, Vietnam, Japan and Italy, which is represented by the presence of Soho spaghetti (stir-fried with chicken or beef), angel hair pasta (with shrimp or without), and fettuccine Alfredo. (The presence of fettuccine Alfredo is downright disconcerting. I like Thai cooking because the flavors are so clean and clear. Cheesy, creamy Alfredo sauce is the diametrical opposite.)

The additional cuisines enlarge the menu to about twice the size of most Thai restaurants. Some of the language on the menu is a tad eccentric, too. Rather than appetizers, the small dishes at the head of the menu are “Tapas” and “Veggie Tapas.” They range from Thai spring rolls to Vietnamese summer rolls to Chinese wontons to Italian calamari fritti to crab Rangoon, which was most likely invented by Trader Vic Bergeron for his Trader Vic’s chain. There are “Chix Nuggets” as well, which I credit to McDonald’s.

Not all the menu runs that far afield, but there are plenty of twists and turns nonetheless. The rice dishes, for instance, derive from Thailand, China and Vietnam, while the noodle dishes give us Japanese soba and udon, along with both chow mein and lo mein, and even pho.

The question is: Can the kitchen handle so many culinary variations? The answer is ... sometimes, but not always.

For me, chicken satay is a Thai basic; a dish I always taste because it varies so wildly from restaurant to restaurant. In this case, the chicken sticks arrived with a small brazier, over which the chicken was supposed to be finished. But the flame gave out after two sticks. Which was just as well, since chicken tended to stick to the top of the tiny grill. I guess it seemed like a good idea, but it didn’t do much for what should have been just a tasty plate of chicken with peanut sauce and a small cucumber salad.

Another basic dish is the yum yai salad, shrimp and chicken over greens with a sweet lime sauce. The shrimp were barely cooked. The chicken was the same pale chicken from the satay. Neither the greens nor the dressing had much snap.

The Thai spring rolls could have been a lot crisper. The fried rice could have been more fried. There’s a timidity to the cooking here that doesn’t fit in with the assertive flavors that are the hallmark of Southeast Asian cuisine. The meal wasn’t bad — it just wasn’t that good.

When I left, the line to get into Honeyboba was even longer. I was tempted. But without a teenager to guide me, I’d be lost.